Tracing The Rise Of The Right

November 03, 1996|By Todd Gitlin. and Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University and a columnist for the New York Observer. His latest book, "The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars," has just been issued in paperback.

The World Turned Right Side Up:

A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America

By Godfrey Hodgson

Houghton Mifflin, 365 pages, $27.50

Words are our most efficient vehicles for delusions. One of the favored words in recent American politics is "conservative," with its refreshing aroma of wood smoke, its tinkle of milkman's bottles and its aura of ancient wisdom. Yet the politics called conservative in America welcomes upheaval. It aims to liberate one of the most revolutionary forces in human history: the investment of capital. Most economic policies recommended by conservatives do not conserve fields, forests or mom-and-pop stores. They conserve the right of corporate stockholders to shut down a factory and move it wherever they like, whatever the employees, their families or their neighbors may think. They affirm that the mall is mightier than Main Street. Driving highways built by federal tax dollars, tuning in TV stations relayed by satellites developed by federal tax dollars, conservatives ringingly declare that government is the problem. Yet conservative wisdom has become so conventional that in the version offered by a president of the United States whose secretary of commerce died on a trade mission to the former Yugoslavia, "The era of big government is over."

The anomalous rise of a political tendency whose death was long exaggerated has been the subject of a number of valuable books in recent years. Sidney Blumenthal's "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" (1986) traced the consolidation of thinkers, publicists and foundations promoting the thought of Ronald Reagan before Ronald Reagan knew he had any such thought. Michael Lind's recent "Up From Conservatism" offers an ex-insider's view, also emphasizing the maneuvers of conservative elites, to the extent of ignoring the sentiments that lead people rightward. The conservative recoil against the '60s cultural "liberation" lies at the heart of E.J. Dionne Jr.'s superb "Why Americans Hate Politics" (1991).

Now comes Godfrey Hodgson, long one of Britain's keenest journalistic observers of American politics, to retell the story of how the tendency that seemed down for the count got back on its feet and battled its way to the heart of American politics. Hodgson, formerly with the London Sunday Times, co-wrote the 1960s' best examination of an American presidential campaign, "An American Melodrama," about the 1968 election, and followed with an excellent, wide-scope history, "America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon" (1976), which, while well-informed on the New Left and countercultural effusions of the '60s, also properly devoted a good deal of attention to Nixon's Southern strategy, the fruits of which have been ripening in Republican politics ever since. Hodgson was early to understand that in the fabled '60s, America moved Left and Right at the same time. In the current book, he aims to show how conservatives came back after a big sleep--and why, despite the rhetoric of Reagan and Gingrich "revolutions," they still have not prevailed.

After several fitful starts, Hodgson settles into his purposes. He is interested in both intellectual resurrection and popular sentiments. First, he tells--and retells--of American conservatives' intellectual forebears, divided between authoritarians who hoped to conserve tradition and libertarians who hoped to preserve the rights of individuals, especially investors. This he aims to accomplish with cameos of four founding writers--Albert Jay Nock, Ayn Rand, Friedrich von Hayek and Russell Kirk--and later with sections on the indispensable William F. Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman and the neoconservative breakaways from the liberal consensus, especially Irving Kristol, whose musings are amplified by The Wall Street Journal. Except for the vividly drawn Rand, these writers emerge indistinctly. Hodgson's accounts are not only derivative, they are too skimpy to suggest the Right's intellectual power.

Hodgson is more convincing as a chronicler of political-economic transformations of the '60 and '70s in the runup to the Reagan ascendancy: economic decline (and tax revolt), the undermining of patriotic pride, and the "social issues" -- especially the threat to school prayer, which predated the anti-abortion movement and had the effect of mobilizing many evangelicals into political action. He gives due attention to population shifts -- "Southernization" -- and to the recoil against the civil rights movement, itself well-described in Thomas and Mary Edsall's "Chain Reaction" (1991), curiously uncredited by Hodgson.